In late December, the Twittersphere was set alight by tens of thousands of voices who were furious about antigay comments made by Phil Robertson, the bearded patriarch of the A&E reality show “Duck Dynasty,” in GQ magazine. Executives at the cable channel were monitoring the response and, understandably, became concerned about the future of its No. 1 program. Based in part on feedback from social media, it seemed as if the show’s audience — and, potentially, its advertisers — might abandon it. The controversy had gone viral. Hoping to quell the firestorm, A&E announced it was suspending Robertson indefinitely.

Social media and Big Data, the term du jour for the collection of vast troves of information that can instantaneously be synthesized, are supposed to help us make smarter, faster decisions. It seems as if just about every C.E.O. of a global company these days is talking about how Big Data is going to transform their business. But with increasing frequency, it may be leading to flawed, panic-induced conclusions, often by ascribing too much value to a certain data point or by rushing to make a decision because the feedback is available so quickly. This digital river of information is turning normally level-headed decision-makers into hypersensitive, reactive neurotics.

That appears to be the lesson that A&E quickly learned after effectively firing Robertson from “Duck Dynasty.” Many of the negative tweets weren’t coming from the show’s core audience in the middle of the country. Instead, they were coming from the tweet-happy East and West Coasts — not exactly regular watchers of the camo-wearing Louisiana clan whose members openly celebrate being “rednecks.” About a week later, after A&E analyzed the feedback with some more perspective, the network reversed course on Robertson’s “indefinite hiatus,” reinstating him before he even missed a day of taping.

So much for the wisdom of crowds. Or at least we’re finding out that some wisdom is needed to know which crowd to follow. Amazon, eager to get into the content-creation business and rewrite the rules of Hollywood, thought it had a brilliant idea when it announced a plan to crowdsource the views of its customers in choosing which TV programs to greenlight. The shopping giant had seen Netflix use Big Data to help pick its slate of hits like “House of Cards” — Netflix executives had combed through millions of hours of programming and the intentions of its users (what genre they gravitated toward, when they’d watch, pause or rewind) to understand what kinds of shows they wanted to see. Amazon, which didn’t have that data but did have a huge customer base, decided to let its patrons vote on which pilots to turn into full-fledged series. Amazon’s users are unlikely to become Hollywood studio heads, at least not yet: The company’s first big production, “Alpha House,” a political comedy starring John Goodman, was greeted with solid reviews but has gained little traction.

The greatest challenge of Big Data — especially social media — is separating the signal from all the noise. A study by the Pew Research Center, for example, found that Twitter users are more often than not negative. The study, which examined reactions on Twitter to news events, including Barack Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s presidential race, discovered that “for both candidates, negative comments exceeded positive comments by a wide margin.” More disturbingly, that reaction is not representative: “The reaction on Twitter to major political events and policy decisions often differs a great deal from public opinion as measured by surveys,” Pew reported. That is due, in part, to the fact that “Twitter users are not representative of the public”: They are younger and more likely to lean toward the Democratic Party. It turns out that what’s “trending” on Twitter may not really be “trending” at all.

Big Data and massive efforts to analyze it aren’t going away. But the need for judgment — and patience — is more important than ever. A crowd may be wise, but ultimately, the crowd is no wiser than the individuals in it.